From Darkness to Sight

by Ming Wang

  If we were molecular matchmakers, conducting these experiments was like staging singles parties. We inserted a block of sodium into a metal cylinder, and then warmed them up using electrical wires wrapped around the cylinder. As the heat increased, the atoms would vaporize and begin to move very quickly, until they shot out of the tiny opening at one end of the cylinder into a large reaction chamber. These atoms’ intended partners were beamed into the same chamber from a second cylinder oriented at a 90-degree angle. The laser was key to increasing a single atom’s receptivity to another. It was like introducing two people who each had their arms folded tightly across their chests. The yellow laser was used to help a lonely sodium atom “unfold his or her arms” and thus become more receptive to another atom, so they could have a chance to become a sodium couple.

  Over and over again, we threw these atomic singles parties with various configurations, trying to see if a couple would form from each effort. We would know when it happened because the newly formed pair would emit a distinct yellow light.

  Many evenings each week I would key up the atom beams, set up the electromagnetic components, and fire up the laser. Once everything was ready, the rest of the experiment was conducted in the dark. The only light came from the lasers traversing the room, bouncing from one mirror to another. The laser light would pulsate, making a tap-tap-tap noise, like incessantly dripping water. I was like a ghost in the dark, hovering over the machine until two or three in the morning, tortured by that repetitive rhythm. I remembered experiencing a similar rhythm when I was wrapping books at the factory at the end of the Cultural Revolution in China, but the difference was that back then I was sad because I had no hope for a future, but now I enjoyed it since there was a greater, more exciting purpose.

  It was a long, tedious, often frustrating process, but thinking back, my Eastern upbringing and work ethic helped to sustain me. Dr. Weiner was pleased with my efforts. During a faculty and student party at his house, he told colleagues about the diligence and creativity that I regularly applied to the tasks. But once again, my faculty advisor, Professor Miller, was not impressed at all. When he heard Professor Weiner’s complimentary remarks about me, he turned around and asked, “What do most Chinese do in this country anyway?”

  “They’re in the restaurant business,” answered another professor.

  “Exactly,” said Miller. “Weiner is just using Ming to do some precision cooking.”

  I stared at him in disbelief. An awkward silence hung over the group, and then Professor Miller started laughing at his own joke.

  Regardless of my performance, from record high test scores to extremely delicate atomic experiments, Miller would never perceive me as a fellow scientist standing equally shoulder to shoulder with him. In his mind, I was just a Chinese cook in Dr. Weiner’s kitchen. I looked over Dr. Weiner’s shoulder to where Miller stood near a window. I had endured his slights and insults for years, and I was suddenly consumed with the urge to punch him like Bruce Lee would do in his kung-fu movies. Even though Miller was much bigger than I was, I imagined myself leaping up and kicking him in the jaw so hard that his whole body would fly through the glass window and land outside with a loud thud.

  But I didn’t want to be like the Red Guards in China, who assaulted and dishonored their teachers. Restraining my fury, I instead forced a slight smile.

  Professor Miller’s constant discriminatory rebuffs only made me more determined to succeed. Late one night, our research team had been working for hours, and we were ready to call it a night. It was the dead of winter, the temperature outside had been falling, and forecasters were warning of nasty, freezing rain. We were worried about getting home before the road conditions became dangerous. But I continued tweaking the electrical current around the cylinder and readjusting the laser light, with no results. Just before shutting down the entire apparatus, I decided to give it one last try by boosting the current just beyond its limit.

  “Be careful, Ming,” warned John, my lab partner. “If you turn it up too high, the coil could melt and then we’ll have to spend months rebuilding the whole machine.”

  I nodded, nervous that I might ruin our entire project, but then increased the heat anyway. I just didn’t want to give up, as I hoped that maybe under hotter conditions, the atoms would fly a bit more quickly and our odds of atomic coupling might increase. Under the higher electrical current, I smelled the coil start to sizzle. My stomach fluttered and my breath was shallow. I knew I couldn’t keep the machine running this hot for very long because in a matter of minutes, the cylinder’s coils could melt.

  By this point, I had done everything I could think of and had reached the limit of my capabilities. I felt helpless, and I longed for assistance from a power greater than myself. I hadn’t had much exposure to religion and spirituality except for the world literature I read back in China. The concept of faith was still very foreign to me, but at that moment I thought that if there was indeed a God in the universe, this would certainly be the time for Him to show up.

  Peering into the chamber window, I whispered, “God, if you do exist, please come help us!”

  I took a deep breath, and as I looked through the glass again, I saw something I had never seen before. There in the middle of the gas chamber, a bright yellow dot was glowing.

  “There it is!” I shouted. As John rushed over to look, I ran out of the lab and straight into Dr. Weiner’s office to deliver the news. He was just about to go home, but he dropped his bag on the ground and hurried ahead of me back to the lab. He leaned over and saw the bright yellow dot in the middle of the chamber, our first successful atomic marriage. He then fell to his knees, lay down on the floor with his arms and legs spread out to each side, and sang loudly.

  I laughed at the sight of my esteemed professor lying on the floor being as joyful as a kid on Christmas. At long last, a sodium dimer was formed and was glowing with atomic happiness … and so were we. After two years of effort, we had finally gotten the atomic collider to work. Not only had we seen it with our own eyes, but the detector on top of the machine also confirmed the results. I was filled with a sense of awe, not just that the experiment had finally succeeded, but also that I felt as if something supernatural had occurred. But I was a scientist, and there was no room in the scientific mindset for the supernatural. Yet I couldn’t deny the overwhelming sense that perhaps God did exist, that He did hear my simple prayer, and that He showed up in the bright glow of that yellow dot. I began to imagine that this God might be real and powerful and infinite, extending from the grandeur of the universe to the infinitesimal specks of subatomic particles.

  On my way home, I was grateful for the empty roads. I was driving an old car I had bought with my roommates, a white 1973 AMC Matador so massive that we nicknamed her “M1” after the giant U.S. military combat vehicle. M1 was temperamental and stalled out every ten minutes when she was driven. But that night, I didn’t care when M1 choked, shook, and sputtered. In fact, she seemed to be celebrating with me! I was utterly ecstatic, whooping and hollering at the frosted windshield, singing in the icy rain. M1 and I careened joyfully from side to side across the slick streets and swerved our way home.

  The next day, our team recorded the details of the molecular miracle and redesigned the machine to work safely at a higher level of electrical current. Now that we had produced a state-of-the-art collider, I spent the rest of my time in the doctoral program elevating the experiment to a more sophisticated level. We still needed to determine the best speed for the atomic coupling. If the atoms were traveling too slowly with respect to each other, they wouldn’t get close enough to bond; but if they went too fast, on the other hand, they would fly right past each other. Eventually, I fine-tuned a novel technique to measure the ideal speed and direction for forming new atomic couples using the Doppler Effect, a physics principle that links the speed of a moving object and the color of light perceived by it. I was the first author on a series of original articles published by Weiner’s
lab team in the authoritative physics journal, Physical Review A. Our work was cited by scientists like Yuan T. Lee, Steven Chu, and William D. Phillips, who all won Nobel Prizes for chemistry and physics with atomic beam experiments which were similar to ours, but more refined. Each of my Physical Review A papers became a chapter in my thesis. I finished my doctorate in about four-and-a-half years, but I stayed on for another year in a postdoctoral fellowship to continue our team’s work.

  Toward the end of my graduate program, I began pondering what to do next. Watching Shu prepare for medical-school had rekindled my childhood dream of being a doctor. I remembered being a teenager, standing in the circle of medical students in Hangzhou, watching my father leading rounds at the hospital. I was so filled with pride and hope back then, and the years in America had helped me find the freedom and confidence I had been longing for. Maybe now I could finally pursue this beloved dream I always had, but once thought was lost forever.

  And like the sodium atom pairs in my team’s experiment, I had bonded with someone and planned to settle down. Shu and I were married before she left for medical-school in West Virginia. I may have been an excellent molecular matchmaker, but what worked in the lab didn’t work the same way in life. Shu and I eventually discovered that our marriage was not very stable. For years we lived, studied, and worked in separate states. The distance would eventually be our undoing, as our career paths launched us into very different orbits.

  Chapter 9

  The White House

  “Mr. Ming Wang? This is the executive office of the President of the United States,” said a voice through the telephone. “We’d like to talk about arranging for you to visit the White House to meet the President.”

  I wasn’t sure I was hearing him correctly. It was the spring of 1984, a few weeks before President Ronald Reagan was to go to China for an official six-day visit. His staff member told me that the President wanted to meet a select group of Chinese students before his trip.

  “How many students can I invite?” I asked.

  “Up to seven,” replied the coordinator.

  “Will we actually meet the President?”

  “It’s possible, but we cannot tell you for sure at this time.”

  For security reasons, there was no guarantee we would actually meet President Reagan, but eight of us would at least get an up close and personal glimpse into the most iconic building in the country, the White House. My mind traveled back more than a decade to the moment when I stood on the banks of West Lake in Hangzhou to welcome President Richard Nixon. And now, I just might meet another American president. My head was spinning, as I could hardly believe this was really happening.

  A year prior, during my second year at the University of Maryland, I had joined the Chinese Student and Scholar Association, a group that met about once a quarter to plan activities. Our primary objectives were welcoming incoming Chinese students and hosting a Chinese New Year celebration each year. The student exchange from overseas continued to flourish, and we wanted to support the new arrivals in their transition to life here in America. I would never forget how clueless and unprepared I felt when I first arrived on the College Park campus with Jason and Ji-hong, so I was eager to help others transition more easily .

  Jason, Ji-hong, and I would take our M1 to pick up arriving students from the airport and shuttle them around town. We also helped them find and haul used furniture for their apartments, and run any necessary errands. After a year of dedicated involvement, the Chinese Student and Scholar Association voted me president of the University of Maryland chapter of the association, and I told them I have great plans for our organization.

  Up to that point, our group had been rather insular, but I had a vision of reaching out and welcoming our American friends into the Chinese community as well. One of my earliest projects as president of the association was producing and hosting a Chinese film festival. The Chinese embassy in D.C. allowed me to borrow a large number of movie reels, which I took back to the theater at the student union on the College Park campus. The films featured archetypal aspects of Chinese culture, including the Peking Opera, ancient dynasties, and epic moments in history, as well as the difficult stories of the Cultural Revolution depicted by China’s fifth-generation filmmakers. The American movies I had seen back in China had transported me to a previously unknown world. By showing great Chinese films, I wanted to offer the Americans a portal, so they too could experience the unknown world of China.

  The film festival featured movies twice a month. American students and faculty made up about half of the audience at every showing. I was thrilled that the movies were having an impact. After watching these films, our American friends and colleagues said things like, “I’ve never seen such colorful costumes,” or “I had no idea there were so many different ethnic minorities in China.” More understanding between us meant that friendships could blossom more easily. The movie theater became our meeting ground, and these stories helped us communicate with each other. These newly forged connections were exactly what I had set out to foster. Not only did I want Americans to understand more about China, but also I wanted my Chinese classmates to extend themselves beyond their comfort zones as well, and embrace the culture of America. I also wanted to learn more about this great country, in hopes of one day becoming its citizen myself.

  In February of 1984, we hosted a Chinese New Year celebration that was open to the public. About four hundred people congregated in a high-school auditorium in Silver Spring, Maryland. The room was strewn with bright red ribbons and banners. Actors and actresses walked around wearing traditional Chinese garb, and many of the American guests were specially dressed for the occasion as well. Women wore the traditional chipao, a form-fitting, ankle-length gown made of embroidered silk. Men wore Tang suits with rounded collars. The sight made my heart swell, as I felt I had found my calling—to create a cultural heart-to-heart link between my birthplace and the country I now called home. That night I played the erhu onstage, but not the melancholy sounds of blind Ah Bing that I had played during the Cultural Revolution when I struggled to survive. This time, upbeat folk tunes whose rhythms celebrated the new year and a new era of freedom in my life emanated from my instrument.

  As word spread to other campus chapters across the country of how successful our association was in facilitating these cultural connections, I was asked to serve as the national president of the Chinese Student and Scholar Association. It wasn’t long after assuming that post that I received the invitation to visit the White House to meet President Reagan as a representative of Chinese students and scholars here in America.

  I extended this special invitation to seven other Chinese Student and Scholar leaders from nearby universities. On the day of the event, the M1 chugged her way through the streets of D.C., and I parked just a few blocks from Pennsylvania Avenue. The closest I had ever been to the White House before that moment was standing well outside the guarded gates like any other tourist, but now I was honored and excited to be going inside. The grand and gleaming white building struck me as a perfect symbol of America’s open, civilized, and fair democracy, a blazing contrast to the oppressive darkness I had known in years past.

  Our group went through security at the entrance to the West Wing, and a staff member came to greet us in the lobby.

  “A presidential appearance might be possible,” he said, “but I can’t guarantee anything. Vice President Bush will meet with you first.”

  I admired both of these leaders. George H. W. Bush was well known in China, since he had spent more than a year as the head of the U.S. Liaison Office in Beijing in 1974. I also knew that Ronald Reagan had been an actor before he became president. His move from Hollywood to the White House amazed me. I was astounded that such an opportunity to go from actor to president could exist in any country. But I also appreciated President Reagan’s accomplishments, how he restored confidence in the American dream and promoted freedom at home and abroad.

  We were
ushered into the Roosevelt Room, a large conference room across a corridor from the Oval Office. The eight of us remained quiet in such an esteemed place. We sat on thick, high-backed chairs around a long, shiny table set with green tea in Chinese porcelain cups. I was positioned in the middle of one side of the table, with my compatriots on either side of me. We faced the doors and looked up in anticipation whenever they opened.

  The staff member who had greeted us in the lobby poked his head in the door. “We still don’t yet know if the President will show up.”

  The next time the door opened, Vice President George H. W. Bush walked in with a few associates. He sat directly across from me on the other side of the table and proceeded to tell us how much he and his wife, Barbara, had enjoyed living in Beijing.

  “I really appreciated being able to ride bikes everywhere,” he said. “If I did that here, I would get run off the road.”

  I smiled at the image of George and Barbara Bush riding bikes in China. I was certain he had ridden a much better bike than the rundown one I pedaled to the paper-wrapping factory when I was a teenager.

  “We appreciate your support of Chinese student programs,” I said. By that time, some ten thousand students from China had arrived to study at universities across the United States. I asked the Vice President if he knew how many American students were in China, and what subjects they were studying.

  “You know, I’m not sure. But we’ll find out,” he said.

  After nearly half an hour of relaxed, amicable conversation with Vice President Bush, the doors suddenly swung wide open. An influx of nearly fifty people swooshed into the room so fast that a breeze swept over us. The first to come in was a group of reporters with flash cameras, who made their way to the perimeter of the room. Standing tall in the middle of the next group to enter was President Reagan himself. He walked right up to us, leaned in and shook each of our hands.